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L. John Harris

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partners:Zester Daily contributing writer and illustrator L. John Harris has lived and worked in and around Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto since the 1960s. Since the sale of his cookbook publishing company, Aris Books, in 1990, Harris has worked as a journalist, cartoonist and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of "The Book of Garlic" (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975) and the graphic memoir "Foodoodles: From the Museum of Culinary History" (El Leon Literary Arts, 2010). A vintage guitar collector, Harris launched the nonprofit Harris Guitar Foundation in 2013 in collaboration with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

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La Vie en Rose: Bread and pain. The staff of life and the pain of life. One could hardly imagine more disparate phenomena, n’est-ce pas? Nevertheless, the French word for bread is lepain. Given no etymological connection whatsoever between the French “pain” and the English “pain,” it would appear that this is a random frissonde langue. With a common alphabet of only 26 letters there are bound to be odd bedfellows in English and French. Oui?

Well, let’s explore our little frisson a bit further. Our Café French™ lesson today brings us again to the vibrant Rockridge district of Oakland, Calif., and Oliveto restaurant and cafe, where I am joined for breakfast by Lisa Taylor, a Paris-born linguist, who can shed light on our subject.

Oliveto’s menu, of course, leans toward Italian, but its upscale cafe is one of the few in the East Bay that hints at the spirit of “cabal,” that 19th-century socialist philosopher Charles Fourier believed to be the essence of French cafe society. Where better to conspire over the linguistic nuances of bread and pain?

Breaking bread is a pain

Taylor, who now lives and teaches in Oakland, arrives in an outfit that screams “Paris” — skin-tight pants, a beautiful floral blouse, a skimpy leather jacket and, of course, a perfectly arranged scarf. Evidently, you can take the linguist out of Paris but you can’t take the Paris out of the linguist.

After settling in and ordering — poached eggs and a latte for me; smoked salmon, cream cheese, toast and tea for our linguist — I present Taylor with my understanding, admittedly meager, of a symbolic link between le pain and pain in Christian doctrine.

When one “breaks bread,” le pain (pronounced “pan” with a soft “n”) does not feel the pain (la peine, pronounced “pen”). Yes, but when scripture speaks of Jesus Christ as “the bread of life” and then, on the cross, as “broken bread,” well, that’s another story. The agony of the cross is, ergo, the agony of the bread. Now fast forward through Christ’s resurrection and the birth of the church to the liturgy of Holy Communion where the body (bread) and blood (wine) of Christ are symbolically ingested.

Here Taylor, a lapsed Catholic, stops me short. “French Catholics believe that the body and blood of Christ are literally, not symbolically, present in the bread and wine.” She then translates the French saying, Nul pain sans peine — No bread without pain. “We take our bread and our pain very seriously!” Taylor clarifies one more minor point. “The cultured French would never break bread with their hands,” she says. “They cut bread with a knife, and usually on a diagonal.”

Our server delivers our beverages and while we sip, I take notes as Taylor, fluent in five languages, ventures into etymology. The French word “le pain” has its roots in Sanskrit and Latin. The Sanskrit pa (long) and nis (to feed or nourish) evolved into Latin as panis. And when we break bread with another, we are copains — friends. The co is from the Latin cum, meaning “with” — with bread. In English, the word “companion” literally means bread mate.

La Vie en Rose

One in a series of graphic explorations of French language, food and culture

How you say it matters

My perfect poached eggs arrive along with Taylor’s silky smoked salmon and thick Philly cream cheese. Taylor takes a piece of Oliveto’s levain toast and holds it up. “The word ‘levain’ is pronounced with that same nasally vowel sound as ‘pain,’ ” she says. “It sounds the way a French baby cries, ouin, ouin. English and American babies go whaa, whaa.”

Taylor emphasizes the importance of correct pronunciation. “If you don’t pronounce zee words correctly,” she says charmingly while spreading the cheese on her slice of toast and layering it with salmon and cucumber slices, “your server may not understand what you are ordering and express dédain.”

French words like le dédain (disdain), le lapin (rabbit), vingt (20), and of course, le pain, are all words that contain versions (ain, in, ing, etc.) of the 40 ways to write the ouin, ouin sound in French. Taylor also advises getting the French articles and genders right. “Order la pain instead of le pain and you could end up with a plate of lapin.”

Speaking of rabbits

All this talk of pain, le pain and le lapin stimulates Taylor’s childhood memories of the little chocolate rabbits she consumed during Easter services. Aha! More links. Broken bread is resurrected as chocolate lapins. Easter’s rituals were associated by early Christians with the pagan celebration of spring, and rabbits are symbols of both fecundity and resurrection. The female rabbit’s prodigious procreative capacities are evident in her ability to get pregnant twice in the same season, carrying two litters simultaneously.

Finishing off my délicieux repas, I’m feeling rather pregnant myself. I announce in my best French: “Je suis vraiment plein” — I am really full. (It’s the ouin, ouin sound again.) Taylor, laughing, corrects me. “Plein is not used for human fullness. Rabbits can be plein, but not people. Your pockets can be full of money (pleines de monnaie) but you are repu — Je suis repu.”

“Oh,” I respond. “So if I eat too many chocolate rabbits it will be Je suis repu de lapins en chocolat. But if I buy a box of chocolate rabbits, it will be Une boîte pleine de lapins en chocolat.”

“C’est ca!” Taylor responds.

And with that, our poly-lingual fashionista rises, kisses me on both cheeks and strides off. Alone again at the table, I order another latte and scan my notes. I feel the relief that always follows the intensity, and vague humiliation, of my Cafe French™ sessions with Lisa Taylor. My brain is full — Mon cerveau est plein.

Yes, meatballs are here again, those eternally returning spheres of gastronomic delight. Not high on anyone’s culinary sophistication list, meatballs have an earthy attraction that seems to come and go through the years. Now they are back big time with Michele Anna Jordan’s collection of meatball marvels, “More Than Meatballs” (Skyhorse, 2014).

The more-than-ness of the book puts the traditional meatball in a broad culinary context, as the subtitle —”From Arancini to Zucchini Fritters and Everything in Between” — suggests. There are more than 75 recipes, plus variations, so you can imagine just how far Jordan has ventured.

Yet the soul of the book remains the traditional meatball – named thus for good reason: Try making a meatcube, meatpyramid or meatcone. Even those words look horribly wrong! No, the meatball is a culinary merger of form and function no less perfect than its mechanical relative, the wheel.

The only other cooked product of man’s hungry genius that rivals the meatball for salutary simplicity and earthy economy is, I believe, the omelet. Curiously though, the omelet works inversely to the meatball: Omelets begin life round (the egg) and leave it flat. The meatball starts life flat (chopped meat, poultry, fish, etc.) and ends round.

Of course there are flat-sided meatballs: sausage and hamburger patties and the monolithic American classic — meatloaf. These more-than-meatball entities are what one observant aficionado of this class of foods, the eminent European artist, writer and restaurateur, Daniel Spoerri, has labeled “the premasticated” — chopped animal-based foods. The ancient Persian word for meatball — kufteh — means, according to my sources, “chopped” or “ground.”

Michele Anna Jordan. Credit: Courtesy of Michele Anna Jordan

Context is everything

It was actually Spoerri who introduced me to meatball-ogy. After absorbing his postmodern deconstruction of the meatball in “A Dissertation on Keftedes” (keftedes, a Greek variation on the Persian kufteh) in the 1970s, I reprinted the work in a collection of Spoerri’s food-related texts, published as “Mythology and Meatballs: A Greek Island Diary Cookbook” (Aris Books, 1982). The dissertation is full of learned and charmingly funky discourse on the social history and symbolism of the meatball in the context of world gastronomy.

But Spoerri’s material (Newsweek called it “a Dadaist sampler of culinary oddments”) seems a bit beside the point when we are truly hungry and a well-made bowl of sauced or souped meatballs, steaming hot and redolent with spice, is placed in front of us. For example, there’s Jordan’s meatball and pasta dish of Spanish descent, Sopa de Albondigas y Fideo, from the chapter titled with meatball-in-cheek irony, “Context Is Everything.” It’s a perfect dish to warm the soul on a cold winter’s night.

Out of context, served “neat” as Jordan puts it, the book’s mother of all meatballs is, logically enough, The Meatball (see recipe below), an “Americanized Italian immigrant,” writes Jordan. It is made from ground pork and beef and mixed with grated cheese, egg, onion, red pepper flakes, nutmeg and clove. Jordan adds that this meatball, as good as it is on its own, lends itself to almost any context: in classic spaghetti and meatballs with marinara sauce; in lasagna; in soups; or as part of sandwiches and sliders.

Optionally, these balls can be wrapped in caul fat — readily available now at trendy butcher shops — for added richness and succulence. Jordan’s introduction of caul fat — the stomach lining of pigs used as a casing for the traditional flat sausage patty in France known as the crépinette— makes for a perfect “coverup” for The Meatball and many other versions in the book. The very good step-by-step photographs of caul-wrapping technique are helpful to the novice caul wrapper.

Using caul connects Jordan’s creations to the ancient “minces” wrapped in pork omentum (caul) one finds in meatball compilations dating to ancient Rome, including the classic cookbook attributed to the gourmet, Apicius — De Re Coquinaria (“on the subject of cooking”).

The Global Meatball. Illustration credit: L. John Harris, 1990

Karma goes around, too

After decades in and around the food world, it’s starting to dawn on me that I have a karmic relationship with the meatball. First with Spoerri’s Dissertation, which inspired one of my first Foodoodle cartoons, “The Global Meatball” (see illustration). And now with Jordan’s “More Than Meatballs.”

I first met and worked with Michele Anna Jordan when she approached me in 1988 with her groundbreaking manuscript for “A Cook’s Tour of Sonoma” (Aris, 1990), the first of her many fine cookbooks, many of which are coming back into print. Spiraling forward through the decades, I was delighted by the opportunity to connect with her again, this time providing the foreword (without compensation, I should add) to “More Than Meatballs.” How could I resist my meatball karma?

Although I didn’t know it when I took on the task, it appears the humble, global, historical meatball is, as Jordan explains in the book’s introduction, back in fashion, and apparently for some time. And not just on restaurant menus and kitchen tables. There are now meatball-themed food shops and food trucks popping up across urban America and a new Guinness World Record for a meatball at more than 1,100 pounds.

“More Than Meatballs” is just the latest, and surely one of the best, examples of the meatball’s enduring power to please and sustain. Jordan puts it better than I could: “Yes, meatballs are on a roll, a rock ‘n’ roll. Let’s dance! Let’s have a ball!”

1. Put the bread and milk or wine into a mixing bowl and use a fork to crush the bread and blend it into the liquid. Set aside for about 15 minutes.

2. Add the beef, pork, onion, garlic, Italian parsley and cheese to the bowl and mix well. Season generously with salt, several turns of black pepper, red pepper flakes, and several gratings of nutmeg and mix again. Add the eggs, mix well, and then knead for a minute or two until very well blended.

3. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour or as long as overnight.

4. To finish, cover a sheet pan with wax paper.

5. Use a 1-ounce ice cream scoop to form small meatballs or a 2-ounce scoop to make larger meatballs; set each ball on the wax paper.

— If using bread crumbs, put them into a mixing bowl, add a meatball, and agitate the bowl to coat the meatball well. Set it on a baking sheet and continue until all are coated.

— If using caul fat, spread the fat on a clean work surface and wrap each ball.

6. To cook, pour a thin film of olive oil on a heavy skillet set over medium-high heat. When the pan is hot add several meatballs, being certain not to crowd them. Cook for about
45 seconds and then agitate the pan so the balls roll. Continue cooking until the balls are evenly browned and have begun to firm up, about 5 to 7 minutes, depending on their size. Set the cooked balls on absorbent paper and continue until all have been cooked.

7. To serve neat, return the meatballs to the pan, reduce the heat to very low, cover, and cook for 4 to 5 minutes for small meatballs and about 12 minutes for large ones, until the meatballs are just cooked through. Transfer to a platter and serve hot.

Main photo: Fresh Herb Meatballs are among the recipes featured in Michele Anna Jordan’s book. Credit: Liza Gershman

La Vie en Rose: Île Saint-Louis, one of two small islands floating in the middle of the River Seine and hyped in travel literature as “a peaceful oasis of calm” in the heart of busy Paris, is anything but. A tourist mecca, bien sûr (of course), filled with snazzy shops and restaurants — and home to the legendary Berthillon ice cream — the scene is more Coney Island fun park than Parisian island oasis.

La Vie en Rose

One in a series of graphic explorations of French language, food and culture

Our Café French lesson today takes us to the island’s trendiest cafe, Café Saint-Régis on Rue Jean du Bellay. Just across — via the Pont Saint-Louis bridge — from Paris’ other natural island, Île de la Cité, where Notre Dame resides in all its gloomy Gothic glamor. The Café Saint-Régis is what I would call faux belle, refurbished to evoke the gaudy Art Nouveau atmosphere of Belle Epoque Paris, with gaudy prices to match. It can be, like the island itself, cloying.

Living in a Parisian broom closet

Whatever joie de vivreParisian cafes provide their devotees — like me — I’m just not buying it today at the Saint-Régis. Lest we forget, cafes have their dark side: Revolutions and assassinations have been plotted, even launched in Parisian cafes throughout history, and the despair-laden philosophy, Existentialism, was hatched in Jean-Paul Sartre’s favorite cafes after World War II.

My dark mood today is more ennui – that perfect French word for melancholy — than despair. I’ve been staying in a very small apartment on the island — much smaller than the rental agency photos indicated. So I vegetate (call it work) in the island’s cafes to escape domestic claustrophobia, something apartment-dwelling Parisians have been doing for centuries.

The only joie of note at the Saint-Régis today is triggered by my waiter waltzing (literally) around the cafe with his broom — a push broom, a smaller version of the broom type we use in the U.S. for exterior cleanups. I could write a whole treatise on France’s bizarre broom methodology: In short, the French push, they don’t sweep!

A broom ballet on Rue Jean du Bellay

Googling broom history and etymology — in both French and English — I come across our lesson’s homophones, le ballet (the dance) and le balai (broom), identically pronounced — bal-ai.

But back at the apartment, my mood darkens again. The sight of the kitchen push broom leaning against the wall triggers gloom, not cafe joie. Maybe this is just a case of generic Island Fever (la fièvre de l’île), or the oppressive weight of French history that floats over the island like a giant bejeweled crown.

A whole lot-a Louis going on

Everywhere you go on Île Saint-Louis there are references to King Louis IX, the island’s beloved Saint Louis. Bridges, streets, hotels, churches and cafes carry the name or variants. Even the word régis in Café Saint-Régis, means “of the king.” My corner cafe/brasserie where I go for my morning petit déjeuner is Le Louis IX. It was Louis XIII in the 17th century, dubbed “the Just,” who developed the island’s urban plan — it had been a cow pasture — and named it in honor of Saint Louis.

À propos royal sobriquets, several of the 18 Frenchmen who have served as King Louis have earned less-flattering nicknames. In the ninth century there was “the Stammerer” (Louis II), in the 10th “the Lazy” (Louis V) and in the 12th, “the Fat” (Louis VI). You could say that the French have had a love/hate relationship with their mostly House of Bourbon Louises.

Shrimp Louis. Illustration credit: L. John Harris

Honestly, I’m surprised there was never a “Shrimp Louis.” The likely candidate would be King Louis XVII, son of guillotined King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Never attaining the throne after the revolution, the Dauphin died in prison at age 10. He didn’t live long enough to earn a snappy moniker.

Speaking of salads

If I thought my one-bedroom apartment was small, I was corrected at a dinner in the chambre de bonne (maid’s quarters) of Paris guidebook author Annabel Simms, an English expat. Her book, “An Hour From Paris,” is a perennial seller in Paris and is designed to take tourists out of crowded Paris for memorable day trips.

The fifth floor studio walk-up on the island’s main drag, Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île (of course), is equipped with a tiny wall-mounted kitchenette — two burners, under counter fridge and sink. “And,” Simms boasts, “no microwave!” Simms, who is currently working on a cookbook geared to simple French apartment cooking, serves me her version of Elizabeth David‘s “Salade Parisienne,” from “French Provincial Cooking” (1962), composed of fresh vegetables, hard-boiled egg and slices of room-temperature roast beef, dressed with a vibrant vinaigrette. Simple, delicious and perfect for a warm summer night.

The conversation drifts toward my host’s mixed reviews of her island oasis lifestyle. She’s been living frugally and productively on the pricey Île Saint-Louis for more than 20 years and avoids the expensive touristy spots like Café Saint-Régis. “I love their baby Spanish sardines served in the tin with the lid rolled up,” she admits, “but I’d rather go to the cheaper Café Lutèce next door with its terrace facing north towards the Seine and the quieter right bank.”

The next day, back for a farewell crème at Café Saint-Régis before heading back to the States, I ponder Simms’ somewhat cloistered life on Île Saint-Louis. It’s telling that over the course of decades on the island, Simms has built her career as a writer in Paris based on a book that encourages tourists to get out of Paris. After only three weeks here, I’m ready to get out, too. Or is that just my Île Saint-Louis ennui speaking?

La Vie en Rose: As a sensitive and hungry boy, I learned valuable life lessons from the classic series of children’s books by Howard R. Garis featuring Uncle Wiggily Longears, an elderly, kind and wise rabbit. In each illustrated story, Uncle Wiggily takes on the vagaries of life in his forest habitat and solves a social or personal problem within his community of furry critters.

I can recall one episode with gastronomic implications. As best as I remember it, a young squirrel or possum with a taste for candy gets a terrible tummy ache that Uncle Wiggily helps to cure. At the end Uncle Wiggily concludes, “Too much of anything is not too good!”

La Vie en Rose

One in a series of graphic explorations of French language, food and culture

Uncle Wiggily’s lesson in hunger management is like a Hallmark card version of Mark Twain’s earlier drollery: “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” Truth be told, Twain’s version, despite wise Wiggily’s input into my early childhood development, comes much closer to the true “gastronomical me”: “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good food is barely enough.”

Which brings me circuitously to our next Café French™ lesson: the curious linguistic connection between biological and aesthetic taste (goût in French, pronounced goo), and the ailment, gout (goutte in French, pronounced goot), caused by too much taste for rich food and alcohol.

It’s all Greek, Latin, Old French and Anglo-Saxon to me

The use in English and French of the same words — taste and goût — for both aesthetic appreciation and perception of flavor — is deeply embedded in our two languages. As Voltaire, the French Enlightenment thinker, explained in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), the English language “… is a copy of ours in almost all the words which are not Saxon …”

The convoluted etymological links between French goût and English taste, and between French goutte and English gout, are no mere accident and took millennia to develop. Here is a cursory Café French glossary:

Goût (FR): From the Latin gustus, Old French goust = Taste. “Gustatory” in English and “gustative” in French come from the same sources. By the 18th century, goût was associated with aesthetic taste in France.

Goutte (FR): From the Latin gutta, Old French gote = Gout and Drop. It was thought as far back as the ninth century that this inflammatory ailment was caused by little drops of viscous humors seeping from the blood into the joints causing painful swelling — a theory close to the modern explanation.

Gout (ENG): Derives from the Old French gote (see goutte). Again, note Voltaire’s comment above about the origins of many English words.

Taste (ENG): From the Vulgar Latintastāre and the Old French tast = Touch. The Old English smaecken — to taste — derives from the German schmecken, which translates as “to taste, try, smell, perceive.”

But why the same words in English, French and most other Romance languages for both aesthetic and physical taste? The complex etymology is well-documented, but I have not found an acceptable answer why our sense of taste — the human faculty least associated with art with a capital “A” (the fine arts) — is used as the metaphor for discerning, as Voltaire put it, “the feeling of beauty and defects in all the arts.”

Our other senses are, in fact, used in some contexts to describe aesthetic taste: You can have an eye for design and an ear for music. But you can’t have an eye for music or an ear for sculpture. Why then does “taste” apply so universally?

Is it because when we taste something, we bring the object of that sense (food and beverage) into the body itself, which, I would argue, renders taste unique among the human senses in being more sensitive? This is a simple explanation I can live with. After all, bad food can kill you. Bad paintings just make you sick.

Uncle Wiggily meets Voltaire in Paris

Voltaire’s ideas about taste emerged at a time when Paris had become Europe’s capital of le bon goût — in art, style, fashion and gastronomy — during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV (1638-1715), the Ralph Lauren of French monarchs. The cafe had arrived as the chic nexus of good taste (both kinds) and the go-to spot for that new, exotic beverage — coffee. But cafes mainly catered to a small Parisian elite in Voltaire’s day. “Taste,” he noted, ” … like philosophy, belongs only to a small number of privileged souls.”

Today, the cafe serves good taste to a much broader swath of souls; less privileged perhaps, but still human. So, imagine for a moment that Uncle Wiggily had ventured out from his forest to travel to Paris with a group of young furry souls — chipmunks, possums, bunnies and bear cubs. They are seated at Voltaire’s favorite cafe, Café Procope (established in 1686 and still going strong), happily nibbling on wedges of quiche and sipping cups of chocolat chaud. The elderly, kind and wise Uncle Wiggily Longears would, of course, be admonishing his charges in his best rabbit French, “Trop de quoi que ce soit n’est pas trop bon!” Too much of anything is not too good …

Yes, Paris’ fall as the world capital of fine dinning and its efforts to revive are well-documented. The most recent, and fairly gloomy, report is by Mark Bittman in his July 22 New York Times piece, “French Food Goes Down.” Bittman is a bit late to the funeral. The media discourse on French gastronomy has brightened of late, and Nicholas Lander’s April 25 column in London’s Financial Times has even hinted at a renaissance of fine dining in Paris.

In any case, fine French food — dead, alive or somewhere in between — has never been the draw of the Parisian cafe.

Joie de Starbucks

It’s true that traditional cafes in Paris, and France generally, are closing in growing numbers. Young cafe-going Parisians and tourists, if not older, die-hard loyalists, are opting for food-trendy, Internet-friendly (Wi-Fi gratuit or free Wi-Fi) alternatives. These include, incredulously, American fast food and coffee chains like MacDonald’s and Starbucks.

Most traditional Parisian cafe owners would rather close up shop than give out their Wi-Fi (pronounced whiff-ee) passwords. Or so it seems. Last summer, I had to swallow my pride (and their “handcrafted’ lattes) and head to Starbucks to access a signal. I was conducting an online interview with Leonard Pitt, the Berkeley-based author of “Walks Through Lost Paris” (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006), a fascinating visual guide to Baron Haussmann’s architectural transformation of 19th-century Paris.

Pitt responded from his computer at the cafe in Berkeley, California’s French Hotel, across the street from Cali/Frenchie Chez Panisse. Working from my computer at Starbucks Odéon, the irony seemed absurd and a little painful. Pitt is a passionate proponent of a cafe-centric lifestyle over the work-ethic culture of Puritan-influenced America. “Nothing better symbolizes,” writes Pitt, “the congeniality, the rhythm and sheer joie de vivre we ache to recapture in life than the cafe.”

Well put, Pitt! But one man’s joie de vivre is another man’s (or woman’s) morning coffee ritual, writing studio, business office, evening gathering spot or flâneurian observation post. And often, all the above and more. The Parisian cafe is more than the sum of its parts.

Our Café French™ lesson today is based on my cafe-centric stay this June in the heart of Paris’ cafe-rich 6th Arrondissement — a perfect location for reflections on the traditional cafe’s basic functions. (See “Parisian Café Index” illustration.)

Wake up (se réveiller) and smell the coffee

When I go to a cafe to wake up with a café crème, the least important criteria for me is the coffee’s origin, quality or, I confess, taste. My critical connoisseur’s brain is still asleep even if my legs can get me there. So, I began each day at cafes within a few minutes walk of my apartment on rue Madame, mostly at my café du coin (corner cafe), Café Madame. There is nothing exceptional about Café Madame — they serve a typical petit déjeuner (decent coffee, acceptable croissant or buttered tartine, reasonably fresh orange juice) — except its convenient location.

After my morning coffee and a short stroll through the nearby Luxembourg gardens, I would arrive back at my apartment awake and ready for work — reading, writing and sketching — before heading out again to another cafe for lunch and more work.

Any cafe can be a working cafe, depending on one’s personal requirements. Kaaren Kitchell, an ex-pat novelist, poet and “Paris Play” blogger combines her daily one-hour walk with her writing and editing projects, so her cafe must be at least a 30-minute walk from home. Her other criteria include a quiet ambiance and, ergo, few tourists. “The French know how to modulate their voices,” says Kitchell, “Americans and Italians don’t.”

Chacun à son café! Ex-pat Paris author, tour guide and bon vivant, Terrance Gelenter, prefers to work in crowded and noisy icons, like Café de Flore. Every Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Gelenter holds “office hours” on the ever-popular terrace for his tour clients and visiting Anglophone writers, artists and musicians. His newsletter, “Paris Through Expatriate Eyes,” offers restaurant and hotel reviews, travel tips and a calendar of arts events.

Talking (parler)

La Vie en Rose

One in a series of graphic explorations of French language, food and culture

Where better than at a cafe to talk? The cafe inhabits a middle world between public and private space, unlike bistros and brasseries, where spirited talking inter-table is welcome, if not required. For the 19th-century Impressionists who broke from the stifling restraints of the Academy, the cafe became a salon where they could engage in debates over aesthetic issues (with the help of addictive amounts of absinthe).

One artist, however, presents an amusingly downbeat view of the cafe’s talking function. That would be the legendary Marcel Duchamp, as quoted in “Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews” by Calvin Tomkins:

“In the case of the Impressionists it could be a very useful thing — one artist would say a word that caught the imagination of the others, that’s true. But it’s a very, very artificial thing … full of new words and flourishing language and so forth, but no actual exchange and no understanding of the other one’s ideas.”

The inscrutable, tight-lipped Duchamp famously abandoned art and art talk when, in mid-career, he withdrew into the silence of chess competition. Which brings us to our final, nonverbal, cafe functions.

Watching (observer) and resting/napping (se reposer/sommeiller)

Much has been written about the cafe’s observational function. It’s as if the cafe, invented in 16th-century Istanbul, was destined for “… the eminently Parisian compromise between laziness and activity known as flânerie!” as 19th-century playwright Victorien Sardou was quoted in Edmund White’s book “The Flâneur.”

As for resting in cafes, it’s a touristic necessity after days filled with shopping and sightseeing. But napping? Well, I admit it’s a conceptual stretch. Nevertheless, while sketching one afternoon at Les Deux Magots toward the end of my summer cafe immersion, I drew three tables pushed together with a man sleeping on top. A visual punchline for my illustration of the cafe’s functions. Come to think of it, for us older, diehard cafe loyalists in search of that elusive joie de vivre — or, at least, an occasional afternoon nap — it’s not a bad idea.

Main illustration: The basic functional modes of the Parisian café. Credit: L. John Harris

La Vie en Rose: Our Café French™ lesson today takes us to Bouillon Chartier, which opened on rue du Faubourg Montmartre in 1896. It’s not a cafe or bistro or brasserie. Chartier is a bouillon, one of a few surviving members of a class of mid- to late 19th-century Parisian restaurants that specialized in hearty faire — especially meaty soups and broths. The low prices at the bouillons attracted workers, artists and shopkeepers in and around the sprawling food markets of Les Halles during the period of rapid commercial expansion during the Second Empire.

Credit for the creation of the bouillon (pronounced “bul-yon” in French, with a silent “n”) goes to Pierre-Louis Duval, an enterprising butcher whose first “broth Duval” opened in 1855. By 1900, the year of the Universal Exposition in Paris, there were hundreds of bouillons in Belle Epoque Paris, some fancier than Duval’s originals (Art Nouveau interiors were the rage), catering to the increasingly affluent bourgeoisie.

Primordial soup

It’s well documented that the modern restaurant (the word and the place) evolved from the restorative meat broths (called restaurants in French, pronounced “res-toe-rone“) served at “health food” establishments in Paris beginning in the late 18th century. Going back still further to the 15th century, a very interesting recipe for a “restaurant” is documented in Rebecca Spang’s fascinating book “The Invention of the Restaurant” (2000).

The recipe is from the French master chef, ChiquartAmiczo, in his cookery book, “Du fait de cuisine” (1420). Amiczo’s instructions call for cooking a freshly killed chicken in an alchemist’s glass kettle along with 60 gold ducats. Not exactly the recipe my grandmother used when she made her famously golden chicken soup to cure my colds.

The English pronunciation of bouillon, with a hard “n”—yone — is the same as for the English word bullion. Bullion, usually in the form of gold bars (ingots in English and lingots in French) has no linguistic faux ami in French (literally, false friend, or “unrelated sound-alike”). Both words, bouillon and bullion, derive from the Latin bullire — to boil or make bubbles.

Compare: To make gold bullion one has to “boil” the gold to liquefy it for the ingot molds. To make a golden court-bouillon (“quick bouillon,” pronounced “coor-boo-yone“), the vegetable-based broth used for poaching fish and light meats, one boils carrots, celery, onion, parsley, bay leaf, thyme and lemon in water, adding white wine or vinegar. Gold ducats optional.

Or one can cheat and avoid culinary/alchemical complexity by using dehydrated bouillon cubes (in French, bouillon cubes), like the Kub Or (gold cube) brand from Maggi, a French division of Nestlé Global.

Follow the monnaie

The pot thickens! Let’s look at a small slice of French history that is as startling as it is inconsequential, the almost simultaneous arrival of two men to the court of King Louis XIII (son of Henry IV) in the first half of the 17th century, one named Bullion and the other Bouillon. (You can’t make this stuff up.)

Claude de Bullion was a French aristocrat who served as Minster of Finance under Louis XIII from 1632 to 1640. He is credited with the creation of the Louis d’Or gold coin, which replaced Spanish doubloons, then in use in France for their coined money — monnaie(pronounced mon-et, as in, “A Monet costs beaucoup de monnaie“). At least one authoritative source insists that the etymology of the word bullion derives from Lord Bullion’s name.

Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, the Duc de Bouillon, was born in 1555 into the royal line associated with the Duchy of Bouillon in northeastern France, which later became incorporated into Belgium. Today, the Dutch city of Bouillon attracts tourists to its medieval castle, Château de Bouillon. Louis XIII was still a boy in 1610 when the Duc de Bouillon became a member of the Council of Regency and a favorite of the Queen Regent, Marie de Médici.

I have found no evidence that Bullion and Bouillon knew each other, but it’s interesting to speculate about what might have happened when M. Gold met M. Broth.

Taking stock at Chartier

Seated at a small table at Chartier, I find no bouillon on the menu — no soup, potage or consommé of any kind. My waiter explains that the weather is too hot for soup. Imagine a Parisian cafe on a hot summer day with no café crème!

But as disappointed as I am, I can almost taste the history of Parisian broth in Chartier’s Belle Epoque interior. You feel as if you have traveled back to the Paris of Emile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris,” his novel set in Les Halles and the market stalls, charcuteries and bistros of the Second Empire.

During that extraordinary period, Duval’s chain of bouillons had made him a “bouillonaire.” But his son, Alexandre, according to fellow Francophile, Susan Griffin, author of “The Book of Courtesans,” squandered much of the family’s wealth on the notorious and exquisite courtesan, Cora Pearl.

When Pearl dumped young, naive Duval, he tried to shoot her with a pistol that miss-fired and almost took his own life instead. The scandal that rocked tout Paris tilted in favor of the scorned Duval and brought down Pearl. The “affaire Duval” was a wake-up call for the bouillon heir who recovered and rebuilt his broth empire.

The golden age of Parisian bouillons is past, along with courtesans, Art Nouveau and the Belle Epoque. The fabled Bouillon Chartier is, at least today, a sad and soupless shadow of its former self. Luckily for cafe and coffee lovers, the thirst for hot coffee, a universal, all-weather restorative brew, will never dry up.